Book: Doug Aitken, 99 Cent Dreams

JTF (just the facts): Published in 2008 by Aspen Art Press (here). 216 pages, with a total of 273 color and black and white images. Includes a short introductory text by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobsen. The works in this volume were made between 1993 and 2007. (Cover shot at right, via Amazon.)

Comments/Context: Doug Aitken is probably best recognized as a talented video artist, a maker of large scale, multi-screen installations and environments. What is perhaps a little less well known is that he is also an accomplished photographer, using the still frame of the photograph to explore many of the same themes found in his videos and films. This hefty monograph collects a significant portion of his photographic output from the past decade and provides an effective introduction to his photographic aesthetic.

Taken together, Aitken's pictures have been edited down into an exercise in non-linear story telling, of taking a narrative thread in one direction, letting it morph into something adjacent, following a tangential idea and then doubling back, repeating and improvising on common ideas, ending up with a swirling, switch-backing set of vignettes and moments that coalesce into an overall description of a way of living and its many moods. It's hard to say exactly what these images are "about": perhaps they are about the dislocating effects of our frenetic, nomadic 21st century lifestyle, of how mind-numbing travel leads to isolation and loneliness, or of how we somehow find ourselves and the small fragments of wonder in the world, caught between something more memorable or important.

There are plenty of subjects and themes that come back again and again in this body of work: shadowy single figures silhouetted against windows, bright squint inducing light fixtures, empty waiting rooms, airplane portholes, anonymous hallways and darkened hotel suites, abandoned junk, people seen from the back, parking garages and bus stations, the detritus of our lives, and the quiet of twilight. Time seems to speed up and abruptly slow down in this story, leaving us trapped in a fog of jet-lagged, motion-sick melancholy, fixating on some detail for just long enough to see something a little surprising or unexpected before we are whisked forward to yet another disconnected, disorienting limbo zone.

While most of these images have a casual, snapshot aesthetic, there is a remarkable consistency of vision across more than a decade of Aitken's shooting. This is a book that has grown on me as I have looked at it again and again, the work revealing its secrets modestly and slowly, telling the story patiently as I tried to reconcile some of its seemingly more random inclusions. Not every image is by any means a stand out or would necessarily function well as a single, solitary photograph, but the careful sequencing of the pictures delivers something subtle but profound, a multi-layered portrait of a transitory, in-between world.

Collector’s POV: Doug Aitken is represented by 303 Gallery in New York (here), Regen Projects in Los Angeles (here), Victoria Miro in London (here), and Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich (here). His photographic work has become more consistently available in the secondary markets in recent seasons, with a handful of lots coming up for sale each year. Prices have ranged between $2000 and $55000, based roughly on physical size and the number of works in the edition.

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)

Jack Pierson, Go there now and take this with you @Bortolami

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 large scale color works, pinned directly to the wall (not framed), and hung intermittently on the walls of the front gallery space. Each of the images is a folded pigment print, in an edition of 3, in one of three sizes (or reverse): 83x62, 63x63 or 43x57. All of the works were made in 2010. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Jack Pierson's new photographs have an eye-catching posterish quality to them. Printed extra huge and folded as if to fit in a mailing envelope, they explode with vibrant colors, almost in the manner of stock photography. There is a pink pyramid, a goldfish, some yellow netting, a cross of white poles against a deep blue sky, a tombstone, an empty dirt road in the woods, various sunsets, a marble torso, and some palm fronds on fire. None of these subjects is at all new or inventive, nor are they taken with any particular artistic point of view, and yet, the pictures have been executed with such saturation and energy that it is hard not to be drawn in.

What I found most interesting here is was the underlying idea of mixing high and low art, the portable, much handled form factor of a poster in contrast to the venerated artwork protected under glass. The images are bold, like symbols of themselves, the kind of thing used as a decorative reminder or as a souvenir to cover a wall, something to identify with or trigger a personal memory. (Moyra Davey explored this same idea of the folded/mailed imagery in her recent show of work (here), although her pictures were smaller, more personal and intimate.)
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Of course, these works are not actually posters, but expensive artworks in small editions. Some people will certainly frame them, even though that goes against the essence of their existence, further exposing the contrast between the everyman and the art collector. In the end, while the images themselves are relatively commonplace, I found this exploration of what defines the physical limits of photographic art quite a bit more compelling.
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Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced between $15000 and $20000 based on size. Pierson is formally represented by Cheim & Read in New York (here), Regen Projects in Los Angeles (here), and Galerie Thaddeus Ropac in Paris/Salzburg (here). Pierson's photographs have come up for auction from time to time in recent years, roughly ranging in price between $2000 and $12000. Those works were however much smaller than what is on view in this exhibit, so take the price history with a grain of salt.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Features: The Year in Pictures (here, here, and here), Opening Ceremony (here)

Jack Pierson, Go there now and take this with you

Through August 31st

Bortolami Gallery

510 West 25th Street

New York, NY 10001

James Welling, Glass House @Zwirner

JTF (just the facts): A total of 22 color works, framed in white and matted, and hung in two gallery spaces and the entrance hallway. 16 of the works are color inkjet prints, each roughly 33x50 (or reverse); they are printed in editions of 5, and were made between 2006 and 2009. The other 6 works are also color inkjet prints, but they have been individually overpainted with acrylic paint, making each unique. These prints vary in size from roughly 7x10 to 12x13, and were also made between 2006 and 2009. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: James Welling's photographs of Philip Johnson's famous Glass House in New Canaan, CT, are complex experiments in the properties of colored light. The house itself sits like a jewel box in lush landscaped grounds, and Welling has alternately used its transparency and reflectivity, in conjunction with a rainbow of colored filters, to create a kaleidoscope of flares, shadows, distortions, glares, and blurs. He has transformed the colorless glass building into a prism, where layers of colors seem to explode in all directions.

Welling's images highlight the combination of space in the architectural design, where interior and exterior merge, and views from the outside look right through the building, unbroken by the structure. But the real originality in these pictures lies in their wild overlapping colors, the psychedelic orange, the deep magenta, the neon green, the cool royal blue, and the acidic yellow. Sunsets, grassy lawns and snowfields take on unreal tints and hues, often made more chaotic by a multiple reflection of a nearby tree branch or the use of a negative reversal. Angles and geometries are carefully controlled to separate the colors, creating unexpected pairings and abstract mixtures. In a group of smaller images hung in the entry, Welling has gone further, adding a layer of painted washes to the photographs, the drips and swirls adding texture and further fogging to the already eye-popping compositions.

Stripped of their color, these images would likely be characterized as unspectacular shots of a masterpiece of Modernist architecture. The infusion of vivid, radical color has however taken this cool, detached structure and given it moods: melancholy, anger, anxiety, and hazy afternoon mellowness. The color is no longer embedded in the identity of the underlying subject, but sits as a layer or filter on top. In a certain way, it is as if Welling has "appropriated" this iconic building, and made it his own via mash-ups with intense, stratified veils of color. Straight representation and color field abstraction have been merged together, creating images that are both pleasingly decorative and intellectually challenging.

Collector's POV: The large color prints in this show are each priced at $25000; the smaller overpainted prints are available for $10000 each. Welling's photographs have been available in the secondary markets from time to time in recent years, generally pricing between $2000 to $10000. Welling is also represented by Regen Projects in Los Angeles (here).
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artforum 500 words (here)
• Review: LA Times (here)
• Interview: Artinfo (here)

James Welling, Glass House
Through April 24th

David Zwirner
525 West 19th Street
New York, NY 10011

Book: James Welling, New Abstractions

JTF (just the facts): Published in 1999 by the Sprengel Museum Hannover (here), in conjunction with the DG Bank-Förderpreis Fotografie 1999 exhibit. 52 pages with 16 black and white images. Includes an essay by Alain Cueff in English, French and German. (Cover shot at right.)

Comments/Context: Given the recent surge of press around the Pictures Generation show at the Met (our review here), James Welling is once again back in the spotlight. This thin catalogue is, however, another of our recent finds at Printed Matter in Chelsea, and takes us back a decade or so, to the late 1990s, when Welling was experimenting with abstract photograms.

Welling's process for making these images is worth a quick review. He began by taking strips of cardboard/paper and placing them in intersecting and overlapping patterns on light sensitive paper, thereby creating a white on black image after developing. He then digitally scanned the images, reversed them, and created negative prints that were black on white.

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My first reaction to these images were that they were a riff on Modernism, an echo of the patterns of fire escape shadows, architectural skyscraper skeletons and the Third Avenue El from 1920s New York, only cleaned up and made crisp in a geometric, graphic design mode. (Untitled #9, 1998, at right, via artnet.)

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After looking at them a while, their representation of anything in particular fell away (particularly since the dark areas have no sense of depth or volume), and I was left with sharp edged angles and stark contrasts. Of course, there are obvious relationships to the history of photograms (Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy et al), but in many ways, these images seem to function more like Franz Kline Abstract Expressionist paintings, the thick lines anchoring the pictures and shaping the space.

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To our eyes, there is an undercurrent of simple art school cleverness here, but overall, these are compelling and visually exciting abstractions that challenge the edges of what we define as photography.

Collector’s POV: James Welling is represented by David Zwirner in New York (here) and Regen Projects in Los Angeles (here). Welling's photographs have come up at auction from time to time over the past few years, generally in the $2000 to $10000 price range. For our collection, one of his flowers would be the obvious best fit, although a print from this series of abstractions would also make a compelling foil to our city scenes from the 1920s.

Transit Hub:

• Welling's UCLA faculty page (here)
• Surface Histories, Art in America, 2001 (here)
• BOMB magazine interview, 2004 (here)
• Flowers (here)
• Whitney Biennial 2008 (here)
• Upcoming event at MoMA in October (here)